Interventions as experiments: Connecting the dots in forecasting and overcoming pandemics, global warming, corruption, civil rights violations, misogyny, income inequality, and guns

Woodside, Arch G.

This essay applies the “ultimate broadening of the concept of marketing” for designing and implementing interventions in public laws and policy, national and local regulations, and everyday lives of individuals. The ultimate broadening of the concept of marketing: Marketing is any activity, message, emotion, or behavior by someone, firm, organization, government, community, or brand executed consciously or nonconsciously that may stimulate an observable or non-observable activity, emotion, attitude, belief, or thought by someone else, group, organization, firm or community. The broadening definition applies to the current interventions by national and state/provincial governments as well as healthcare facilities, medical science facilities, firms, and individuals to mitigate and eliminate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Framing interventions as experiments is helpful in improving the quality of their designs, implementing them successfully, and validly interpreting their effectiveness. In January and February 2020, a few nations were exemplars for accurately forecasting the coming disaster of COVID-19 as a cause of illness and death and in designing/implementing effective mitigating strategies: Denmark, Finland, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Norway, and Vietnam. While the COVID-19 prevention intervention tests now being run for several promising vaccines are true experiments, the researchers analyzing the data from these interventions may need prompting to examine the efficacy of each vaccine tested by modeling demographic subgroups for the members in the treatment and placebo groups in the randomized control trials.